Posts Tagged ‘poland’

Writing for Bloomberg, Milda Seputyte and Dorota Bartyzel note the continuing strength of the Polish economy.

Poland’s pace of economic growth last year almost doubled from 2013, buoyed by increased investment and consumer spending as falling prices boosted their buying power.

Gross domestic product rose 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the fastest since 2011, after a revised 1.7 percent increase in 2013, the statistics office in Warsaw said Tuesday. That matched the median estimate of 29 economists in a Bloomberg survey.

Poland, whose economy is the only one in the European Union that’s gained every year through the global financial crisis, benefited from a pickup in domestic-demand growth to 4.6 percent in 2014. Fixed investment surged 9.4 percent from 0.9 percent a year earlier, the statistics office estimated.

“Last year was a really good one for Poland, despite outside geopolitical tensions and weakness in the euro area,” Adam Antoniak, a Warsaw-based economist at UniCredit SpA’s unit Bank Pekao SA, said by e-mail. “We had a noticeable rebound of domestic demand, which was the main engine of economic expansion, and that positive trend should be continued this year, helping to maintain a similar pace of growth.”

[. . .]

The uptick in growth shows the EU’s biggest eastern economy warded off risks emanating from a slowdown in the euro area, its biggest export market. Poland also had to weather the effects of the escalating conflict in neighboring Ukraine, which affected the country through counter-sanctions imposed on Russia.

Bloomberg’s Zoltan Simon notes that the surging value of the Swiss franc has left many central European countries, with large numbers of homeowners having mortgages taken out in the newly-strong currency, trying to figure out how to learn from Hungary’s earlier experience.

Governments from Poland to Croatia are under pressure to mimic Hungary’s help for eastern European borrowers with $40 billion in Swiss-franc loans, without repeating the same mistakes.

Romania is considering a proposal to convert franc loans at a discounted rate while Croatia moved to force banks to take exchange-rate losses for the next year. Poland, for now, isn’t considering emulating Hungary’s full-conversion of franc mortgages. Leaders in all three nations face elections in the next two years.

As countries in the European Union’s east weigh steps to help about 800,000 borrowers, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s five-year fight to root out foreign-currency loans is serving as both a model and a cautionary tale for policy makers. Orban’s measures weakened the forint and curtailed lending before he moved to convert all foreign-currency mortgages in November, ahead of the franc’s surge last week.

“The Hungarian lesson should raise some red flags,” Viktor Szabo, who helps oversee $12 billion in emerging-market debt at Aberdeen Asset Management Plc, said by phone from London on Tuesday. “While there may be valuable lessons in there, a bank-sector shock similar to Hungary’s may jeopardize growth in the region.”

With Poland’s dynamic but stagnant domestic economy, looking east to cultivate Ukraine as an economic partner as described by Bloomberg’s Konrad Krasuski and Maciej Martewicz makes perfect sense.

The Warsaw Stock Exchange, home to a dozen traded Ukrainian companies, is betting on more listings from the former Soviet republic once the conflict there recedes and will offer to help develop Kiev’s nascent capital markets.

Growth on the Warsaw bourse, central Europe’s biggest stock market, stalled last year after the government halted sales of new companies to the public and overhauled its pension fund industry.

After merger talks with Vienna failed last year, Warsaw bourse is turning east to help more Ukraine enterprises find funding in a country with 10 mostly illiquid bourses. The Ukraine conflict with pro-Russian rebels has killed more than 4,800 people, pushed Poland’s eastern neighbor into its deepest recession since 2009 and left investors skittish about the country of 43 million people.

“Ukraine is a natural, strategic direction for us,” Chief Executive Officer Pawel Tamborski said in an interview at the Bloomberg News office in Warsaw yesterday. “We understand that now it’s not the priority for the Ukrainian government, but we are ready to help make the market less fragmented.”

Ukrainian companies have sold 2.9 billion zloty ($797 million) of shares in Poland since 2006, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. They were lured by the country’s pool of pension and mutual funds and the higher stock-market liquidity than on any of their home country’s 10 stock exchanges.

Towleroad links to the interview of the widowed partner of Sydney siege victim Tori Johnson.

Window on Eurasia notes the departure of migrant labourers from Russia, looks at Russian preferences to keep a pro-Russian Donbas within Ukraine, and looks at the ideological issues surrounding Russia’s opposition to Ukraine and the West.

Open Democracy looks at the declining importance of Israel as an enemy to the Arab world, questions the extent of Russian support for the European far right, notes the insertion of Orthodox Christianity into public teaching in Russia, and notes the failures of political Islam in Tunisia.

Anti-Arab slogans and graffiti are widespread in Israel, and Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, estimates that there are more than 50 Israeli discriminatory laws against Arabs. A new law making Israel the “nation-state of the Jewish people” that clearly discriminates against Arab citizens has already been passed by Israel’s cabinet. Dozens of Knesset members also support it.

This violent and irrational Israeli hatred and maltreatment of Arabs needs an explanation. In my view, it derives largely from the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. [. . .] To atone for this crime Europe encouraged the settlement of Holocaust survivors and other persecuted Jews in a faraway Middle Eastern country they did not know and whose people and culture were alien to them.

It was not the answer. In Palestine, the Jews were forced to acclimatise to an unfamiliar place and required to accept a new identity as “Israelis”. A Zionist history was created for them with the religious scriptures as a reference point. Their own past, despised by Zionism as assimilationist or passive in the face of Christian persecution, was to be discarded, and their mother tongues had to give way to a new language, Hebrew. Above all, they had to learn to be a majority when they had always been a minority. And all this in a short period of time as Israel was being rapidly established to defend against a hostile Arab environment that rejected it. That hostility was another challenge the Jewish immigrants had to face and that made all their other difficulties worse.

The solution?

The solution to this tortured situation lies in what may be called the Jewish right of return. Under this right, Europe would welcome back its previous Jewish citizens, at least those still alive, and their descendants, offer them compensation, fund their resettlement and provide jobs and housing. These costs could be defrayed against the EU’s current massive bilateral trade with Israel worth $36bn (with many trade agreements favouring the latter) and its generous grants to its scientists.

Germany is the model for this Jewish return. After reunification in 1990, it welcomed Jews to its towns and cities, with the result that an estimated 15,000 Israelis are now living in Berlin alone, which is experiencing a Jewish renaissance, and many more are applying for German citizenship. Other European states should follow suit, as should Arab countries with Jewish communities who had resettled in Israel.

Where can I begin?

Most of the countries of origin of Israel’s Jewish population–in central and eastern Europe, in the Middle East and North Africa, and beyond–are substantially less economically developed than Israel. Even in fast-developing central Europe, living standards still lag behind Israel’s, to say nothing of poorer countries like Romania, or Ukraine, or Yemen. There really is no economic incentive for Jewish immigration specifically targeted to ancestral countries of origin. Germany has attracted many tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants since reunification, but most of these Jews are migrants from the former Soviet Union and Germany is still much richer than even Poland or Hungary.

Are there non-economic incentives? I am very skeptical of this. In the case of central and southeastern European countries which belong to the European Union, getting an EU passport might well be an incentive for many Israelis. That is it. The old Jewish-Christian communities of central Europe have been almost entirely destroyed, and negative associations understandable remain strong. There is very little alive for potential Jewish immigrants to cling to.

Perhaps most importantly, the majority of Jews in Israel were born in Israel. Ancestral countries of origin are increasingly irrelevant in a mixed population, perhaps almost as irrelevant as they are in another country of recent mass immigration like Canada. Why should they leave their homeland for lands that offer very little that is attractive to them, and does so only at significant cost? A Jewish exodus from Israel may actually aggravate existential issues and Israel-Palestinian conflict: Would a Jewish population weakened by mass emigration and reduced to a hard core of isolated people be more tractable to the Palestinians, or less?

I may get what Karmi is saying. It would have been very nice of these genocides and forced migrations had not happened. They did though, changing things irrevocably and beyond hope of reconstitution. All we can do is live realistically within the world that the past has created.